I've had a week long battle with an attachment in my inbox which wouldn't delete & caused my Windows Mail program to shut down. I finally got it to delete after a lot of trial & error. In the process I developed a new problem with 4 plain white icons appearing on my desktop. They include 2 which say edbress.0000, edb, & edb.chk. All this happened when I exported the messages I wanted to save to a document file. I followed instructions from a Dell tech to delete both of the WindowsMail.MSMessageStore files which erased everything in my Windows Mail program. I then imported the messages back into Windows Mail including the bad attachment, which I didn't know had been saved. I was told to hold down the control button & click on the messages to be saved before exporting. While doing this some of them went into the deleted section even though I never touched the delete key. I then got the idea it would be easier to move everything I wanted to save into the deleted file, & do away with the inbox messages. When the inbox came back in the imported messages I deleted it, problem attachment gone, all messages ok. Windows Mail is working fine, then I found the strange icons on the desktop.

What happens when you try to delete the icons? Do you get an error message?

Last night I deleted all of them & they disappeared at the time. When I started up again they were all back, tried again & the same thing happened. When I click on one icon I get a message Windows can not open the file. To use this file Windows needs to know what program you want to use to open it. What do you want to do? Use the web service to find the correct program or select a program from a list of selected programs? I tried the online search which went to Microsoft & stated this type of file is unknown. Another message states you are attempting to open a file of type "Recovered File Fragments". These files are used by the operating system & various programs. Editing or modifying them could damage system. The other icon opens up Wordpad & is just a bunch of scribbles. I wondered if the file fragments could be the messages I first tried to select for export in my inbox, but were never sent at that time. Another possiblity could be when I accidently deleted some of the messages, & had to reimport them. I have no experience with this sort of thing.

Have you tried moving them to another folder from windows explorer e.g. my documents, then deleting them from. If this doesn't work try disabling system restore and then deleting them. Restart PC if they don't come back then reenable system restore.

To disable System Restore do the following:

Click Start > Control Panel > System > Select System Restore Tab > Tick the box Disable System Restore > Click Apply > Click OK.

Before you disable System Restore make a system state backup. To do this:
Click Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Backup > Click Advanced Mode
Select the Backup tab > Put a tick in System State (make sure nothing else is ticked)
Down the bottom of the window change Backup media or file name to C:\backup.bkf
Click Start Backup > Make sure Replace the data on the media with this backup is selected > Click Start Backup. It will take a few minutes to complete. Once the Backup is complete - click Close
Click the X up the top to exit Backup.

I finally got them off. There was a whole family of icons & they kept reproducing. When this started there were 4 of them, but more would, on occasion, show up after exiting Windows Mail. By the time I got them off there were 12 on my desktop. I finally got rid of them by deleting all files with a similar code, instead of just the original 4 on the desktop. Everything seems to be working ok.

Glad you got it fixed - will mark as resolved.